Chris Coy’s contribution to Contemporary Semantics Beta, an art show curated by Constant Dullaart at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam, consists of two elements:
1. A pair of large, printed images hanging beside one another on the wall.
The first of these images depicts a straight-faced young man in a red t-shirt holding a completely blank, white rectangle vertically (as if it were a painting). The second depicts a group of enthusiastically smiling young people in business attire holding a similarly blank, white rectangle horizontally (as if it were a novelty-size check).
In both of these images, it seems as though the white rectangle should contain some sort of signage which would relate it to the rest of the given scenario, but it doesn’t.
As it turns out, these are appropriated stock photographs whose original intention is to provide either (1.) a clean, broadly cliché “stock” image of a person or group of people holding a generic sign which, for example, a corporate client could easily digitally insert their own chosen signage into the white space; or (2.) a visual equivalent of the phrase “blank slate” which could be used in the off-chance that a magazine or advertising campaign need communicate the idea of “blank slate” in a single potent image.
It’s not the artist who subtracts from the original image here, but the original image created by a stock image company which subtracts from itself; the artist merely points this phenomenon out.
2. The second element in the work is a large, completely blank, white rectangle which is placed on the gallery floor, leaning against the wall below the prints mentioned above.
This white rectangle functions the same way that the white rectangles in the stock photos do:
It is meant to be an open space for something that another person could insert; in this case an artwork.
Coy knows that the installation will survive as a digital photograph. The white rectangle completes a loop – from the mutable digital image on the computer, to the art space, and back again.